


When the Last Leviathan

by VSSAKJ



Series: You Can Never Kill Me [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, Murder, POV Second Person, Theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 16:39:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11809974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VSSAKJ/pseuds/VSSAKJ
Summary: Nothing could ever come between them.Could it?





	When the Last Leviathan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gargant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gargant/gifts).



> These two characters originated in World of Warcraft. They've reincarnated a lot. They've also killed one another more than once. Oops.

You flip a coin: it whirls through the air, heedless of the rain, and lands Empress-side up.

“Lucky.” He chirps, using your shoulder as a means to push himself to his feet. He winds one hand through his hair, wrapping it around his wrist all out to one side, and then strings it up in one long, shining length. He makes a show of tugging the laces on his boots and checking that his vest is buttoned, then places the threadbare old cap on his head and casts a sidelong look at you, “Call it?”

You peer across the road. The rain’s just started to ease, so you can see better than you could a while ago—the fishmonger across the street has seen you both, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. The greengrocer would be a good mark, facing in the opposite direction with a hard broom and a stooped back. But you nod in the direction of the butcher, whose cleaver gleams through the shade. “Let’s do him.”

He cackles with fiendish delight, eyes flashing. “Watch me.” Every word and motion makes you ache for him, despite the hunger of an empty stomach curled round your spine. What made life worth living, if not food and sex?

He’s vanished from your sight but you know better than to peer; sure enough, a moment later he appears, strolling down the street with swagger as though he’s come from the Empress’s own castle. He couldn’t pay the price of a rat’s admission on a ship and his clothes are ragged, but in Dunwall confidence is everything despite how canny the shopkeepers are. He stops by the fishmonger and inspects a hulking chunk of fish; he wanders past the greengrocer without speaking a word.

A foot away from the butcher, he breaks into a sprint.

“Cutpurse!” It’s the fishmonger who gives you away, roaring the warning like a whale calling after a kidnapped calf. You’ve been seen together and the fishmonger points out your hiding place, so there’s no use for it: you set off running, too.

The butcher’s already gone, cleaver in hard, racing after him like lit firework. Seizing opportunity, you take hold of a half-carved leg of ham and pound up the street at pace. You both know better than to stick together when you’re being pursued, but the butcher doesn’t know about you, and the fishmonger isn’t about to leave his stall unattended, not while he worries about whether or not you two might have other allies.

You run up the street after the trail of the butcher’s yelling, taking shortcuts where you know you’ll come out closer to them. The ham brushes up against a wall while you make a tight turn, but since when has a little dirt bothered either of you? You _are_ dirt.

You skid to a stop when you realise you’ve led yourself to a dead end and, in front of you, the butcher advances on your partner with his cleaver raised, positively spitting with fury. You watch his eyes glint, with a different edge this time, and then, right before your eyes, he disappears.

The butcher whirls and you’re running before he can catch sight of you, racing back to the squat you’ve currently claimed as your own. It has to be a mistake. It can’t be what it looked like.

 

You beat him back. You set the ham down by the dead coals of last night’s fire, unwilling to eat it before he arrives. After the sun goes down and you’ve been alone for hours, you start to wonder if he’s even going to come back. Just before you decide to eat the meat anyway, you recognise the sound of his footsteps creeping through the dilapidated stairwell.

When he picks his way through the debris-filled doorway, his silhouette is slumped, with his hair loose and long. He stills on the other side of the room; you wait for him to approach you. When he finally slumps down next to you, he nudges the ham with his foot. His voice is gravelly, nothing like him. “Nice catch.”

“You’re Marked?” You ask the question, unable to put any other words on your lips.

He nods, motionless otherwise. The floor creaks, sounding louder than usual.

“Where?” You’ve seen all of him, more than once, and never noticed. You raise your hand, as if to touch his arm, but he pushes you away. He shuffles further down the stretched pile of old blankets—the bed you’re sharing—and unlaces his right boot, aggressively shoving it off. The sock goes with it and you see the Mark: it’s small and plain and black, nestled between his ankle and his heel like a particularly artistic birthmark.

He wraps his hand over it and squeezes like he’s juicing an orange.

You fumble for any words, finally managing a paltry, “Why?”

“I don’t know.” He snarls, twisting to his feet and kicking the boot out the glass-bare window. He stands on the broken glass and clenches his toes, waiting to hear the thud of boot sole against the ground outside before he goes on. “I don’t want it. I hate it. He didn’t ask me. He just _gave it_ , waving his hand and burning me up from the inside. It’s like food poisoning. You remember?” You nod once, and he goes on. You think you can see blood seeping from his foot. “You know how, when you’ve thrown up everything you ate in the last week, when it was just one day’s worth of food you spread out. You know how hungry that is?” He whips around, his eyes wild as they bore into yours. “That’s nothing to this. This is how hungry you are when it’s been three weeks since you swallowed your last mouthful, and all you’ve been doing to get by is chewing the calluses off your own fingers. When you’re watching fat nobles dump good food into wolfhounds’ mouths because it went cold on their table. When you’re looking at whale blood in the sea and thinking about how much better it would taste that your own spit. Where’s that fucking ham?”

He turns away from you, so he doesn’t see the shiver that convulses through your body. While he squats by the coals and scrapes at the floor for a way to light it, you pick your way out of the space and down the stairs, hoping to retrieve the boot before someone else does. Even in the twilight it isn’t hard to find: a grey outline in the waning light, darker than the dirt around it. Thankfully it missed any of the day’s puddles. You pluck it from the ground and by the time you’ve clambered back up the stairs, he’s remade the fire, the ham stuck on a cracked curtain pole as a spit.

When you offer him the boot, he shoves it away, glaring in the other direction. His foot is still dripping blood, so you abandon the boot and instead dig into the pile of torn bedding until you find a long strip of curtain. When you advance on him to wrap it, he pulls his foot away and wraps his hand around it again, growling, “Stay off.”

“It needs cleaning. It needs bandaging.” You try to reason, promising yourself that you’ll take him down to the sea tomorrow. He likes the sea, and the salt water will do the wound some good.

“I don’t care.” His voice is getting quieter, and the ham gives a sharp hiss as the heat begins to penetrate it.

“I do.” You say simply, and he punches your arm with his lips twisted in a smirk.

 

He wakes you in the middle of the night with his fingers burrowing into the small of your back, his lips to your neck as he whispers, “It’s so dark.” Over and over. You shift enough to shove the curtain rod into the coals; they wriggle to life, glowing orange, and he exhales heavily against your skin, grip just as tight as before. You’re sure his eyes are open, fixed on the sparks dancing in the shadows. It feels like ages before he’s able to relax his grip and return to sleep.

It takes longer still for you to join him.

The ham lasts you the week, and three days after the theft, things are normal again. You take him to the sea every morning, and he laughs high and clear no matter what the weather is. He howls at the ocean like it’s a living thing, kicking spray and punching the water and throwing himself full-bodied into the waves. You find your attention drawn to his ankles more than they ever used to be, but take care that he doesn’t catch you staring.

The fifth night after the theft, he’s on top of you where he belongs, nail pricking into your shoulders as he rides you long into the night. When you’re both finally spent, you feel emptier than you’ve been in months, and although he falls into a fitful sleep beside you, you stare into the breeze all night long.

He mutters words in his sleep and you wish you could hear them. It sounds like a conversation you’re not privy to: it sounds like something you should know.

 

The first time you craft a bone charm, you don’t know well enough to keep it hidden. He screams at you and claws your face, tearing the chunks of bone from your grip and skittering away from your reach. “Why?!” He shouts, hanging halfway out the window with eyes as wide as a whale’s tail. “Why are you _bringing_ him here? I don’t want anything to _do with this_!”

“I’m sorry.” You raise your hands, edging closer. He shivers, loosening his grip on the window frame—you stop. You hold his gaze, ignoring the desire to look at his ankles, and repeat, “I’m sorry.”

He breathes heavily, shoulders shaking. The bits of bone you’d scavenged from the shoreline fall from his fingers; you see it in your peripheral vision, but keep your eyes fixed on his. He quivers, like a horse with a fly-bitten flank.

“Please.” You say it softly, and suddenly he turns, hurling the last piece with all his might. He shouts furiously after it, and before he can enthuse himself out the window, you’ve wrapped your arms around his middle from behind, desperate and tight. You can feel wetness splashing on your wrists, and even though he thrashes against your hold, he makes no concentrated effort to escape.

By the time he’s calmed down, you’ve both sunk to the floor, exhausted. He turns in your arms and fits himself to your body, drawing his lips down the side of your neck before he lets himself go boneless and sleepy. A few minutes later and you’re holding him, no further from the window than before, as he snores softly beneath your ear.

It’s dark out. You place one hand on the back of his head and watch the stars wink into place.

 

The second time you craft a bone charm, you hide it on the floor above your squat. You start out by sneaking up there only when he’s not in—when you’re alone in the dark, your fingers tremble over the smooth pieces of bone, and you’re certain there’s warmth inside them. Sequestered away from any natural light, you feel a great gaping maw open up inside you, one with colourless glowing eyes and square-shaped teeth. Your sense of self detaches from within you and then drains away inside the creature, whirlpooling like bathwater down a plug hole.

You can’t remember a time when you didn’t know The Outsider’s name. Your parents, their names and faces long forgotten, had been superstitious and careful, teaching all their children to fear and respect the Void and the sea.

You brush your fingers over the black mark and wonder how you learned the shape so quickly.

 

He shivers through the night, no matter how tightly you hold him. He kicks and clings at once, yelling words you don’t understand and beating against you like a heart about to burst. You do what you can to soothe him: you know all the motions, stroking his hair and kneading his lower back and murmuring comforts against his ear. His thrashing subsides only so long as you do one of the three—the moment you stop, panic returns to him and he batters you again.

After a month, you begin to think you may never sleep again.

He starts to wander for long periods of time, sometimes not coming back for days. You know you should worry, but instead you relish the time with your growing collection of bone charms, all carefully twisted and wrought by your own fingers. He’s always wandered; he hates it when you follow him.

You’re not sure when you started praying.

The bone charms never give you any response, but the depthless feeling within you seems satisfied when you speak to them. “Let me understand.” You murmur, hunched in the corner of the room, “Let me know. Let me take it away from him. Why are you hurting him? He doesn’t like it. Let me help. I want to help.”

You start to forget what the words mean, holding the charms tighter and pressing your face closer, willing them to respond to you. You’re full up with a sense of urgency, demanding you put this _right_ —your world started feeling right when you met him, and hadn’t felt as wrong as it does now until the day you saw that Mark.

“Please.” In the end you’re begging between quiet, lonely sobs, your tears greying the bones in your hands. You aren’t sure of anything anymore.

A hand touches your shoulder.

You know you should jump, but instead you barely manage to turn your head. Crouched next to you, inscrutable, is The Outsider. You’re completely certain, even though you’ve never seen him before.

“You know,” He speaks, and his voice sounds like it’s coming from a thousand leagues below the surface. “A lot of people spend their whole lives trying to get my attention.”

You want to thank him. You want to seize his bloody throat and throttle him. Your body isn’t capable of moving; you wonder if he’s paralysed you somehow.

He laughs; the sound is hollow, light, and deep all at once. You’re consumed by it, completely wrapped up in the sound of a god’s mirth. It’s tantalizing and breathtaking: touchable air, weighted noise. You think you’re staring, with your mouth gone dry.

He pats your cheek, and your face erupts in pain.

You throw yourself on the floor, hands pressed against the sensation of burning. You hear your own agony echoing back at you, wordless screeches worse than whale oil explosions; your head hits the wood and all you can see are feet floating just a few inches above the ground. The last you hear of that voice, it’s like an iceberg, “See how it suits you.”

 

When you wake, it’s the dead of night. You scrabble along the floor for a piece of glass large enough to reflect your face; it cuts into your fingers, but you grip it firmly as you crawl over to the window. The moon isn’t enough to help you see, but the distant life of richer men is, and as your eyes adjust, you start to laugh. You laugh like a madman—sparking, crackling, delighted—at the sight of a Mark on your cheek.

You stumble down the stairway, eager and excited, but the floor you’ve laid claim to is empty, bare as you left it hours and hours ago. You’re full of new sensations, but only one of them is what you expected: the hunger, the emptiness he described when he complained of his. You run your fingers over the lines of the Mark, knowing their shape even without seeing them. There’s no sensation to them—your skin is as smooth as when it had been bare, as though unchanged.

You laugh to yourself again, then go to the empty window and peer out as though you can see him from this distance. You want to tell him what you’ve done: you want to tell him that you’ve saved him, you’ve taken the menace from him and swallowed it yourself. You want to tell him that you understand the hunger, the starvation, the feel of having burnt from the inside out. You want to tell him you can go together now, through the Void and its works, and never be parted by anything.

You sink down, leaning against the crumbling outline of the window’s space, staring sightless into the night. Eventually, you sleep.

You wake to hands around your throat.

His eyes are aflame and his grip is steel, and he’s so close to your face that you could kiss him. “Fuck you.” You realise he’s speaking, as your brain whirrs into motion. “Fuck you! What the hell is wrong with you? I fucking hate you! It was mine! _Give it back_!”

He shakes you by the neck, and his grip is so tight that you can’t make a sound. You can’t breathe. You wrap your hands around his forearms and squeeze; he lifts you up by the neck and smashes your head back down. You see stars. You try to say his name—you try to say _anything_.

“Fuck you.” He snarls, digging his thumbs into your windpipe. “Who gave you the right? You make me fucking sick. I hate you.”

Your vision is swimming. Your hand is almost too heavy to move, but you let it rest on the Mark on your cheek. Just like before, you can’t feel it.

He spits on your face and shoves you.

As you’re falling, you try to will yourself in another direction, but you don’t go anywhere but down. Before you hit the ground, you hear the sound of heartless laughter, echoing in the distance.


End file.
